Psychiatry & Faith

The current fashion for pitting psychiatry and religion against each other as though they were mutually exclusive took a beating on last week's Catholic Hour from a brilliant Roman Catholic convert who is also a distinguished psychiatrist: Karl Stern, author (The Pillar of Fire) and chief of psychiatry at Ottawa General Hospital. The conflict is not necessary or even real, said Dr. Stern, and the appearance of conflict is fostered by fallacies on both sides.

Among the religious, said Dr. Stern, the most common fallacy is: "If there were only more faith in the world, people would not be nearly so neurotic as they are." But, he went on, "I can show you a number of atheists who are happy people and have never known a sleepless night; on the other hand there are many good, even saintly people, in fact some of our great mystics, who are haunted by terrible states of anxiety and melancholia. That formula does not work ... It is also morally wrong."

Another fallacy: "It is surprising how often you hear people remark behind the back of a patient suffering from neurotic anxieties or neurotic mood disorders, 'If he only pulled himself together--surely he could help it!' . . . Nobody would ever think that an abscess of the gall bladder can be treated by pulling oneself together, but not many people are prepared to look at nervous anxiety states with the same attitude . . . Many religious people use towards a neurotic patient a kind of spiritual approach of 'Pull yourself together!' ... By this attitude religion becomes a sort of mental Band-Aid which must not be missing in any well-equipped psychiatric first-aid kit."

For their part, many psychiatrists suffer from an anti-religious bias that is part of the "general positivistic atmosphere of our time," said Dr. Stern--"the belief that science is the only fountain of truth and that revelation is bunk." Some would go so far as to say that scientific progress has made religion obsolete. Others, more moderate, blame religion and its moral codes for causing neurotic anxiety based on feelings of guilt.

Dr. Stern summed up his own position: "The clear distinction between natural and supernatural means of help, which we make in cases of broken legs, must also be made in cases of emotional disturbance." Then, he believes, religion and psychiatry can pull together instead of working at cross purposes.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.